


here we are safe, here in this quiet

by venndaai



Category: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords
Genre: Angst, Canon Disabled Character, Gen, Guilt, Male-Female Friendship, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Teaching, autistic characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-16
Updated: 2014-10-16
Packaged: 2018-02-21 11:16:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2466287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/venndaai/pseuds/venndaai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bao-Dur’s never had a problem with words. Words are simple enough, written down in Basic or Iridonian. He’s never been a particularly big reader, at least not of fiction, but he reads his technical manuals just fine. Words aren't the problem. The problem is using them. Speaking is the problem.</p><p>He knows people assume this problem of his started after Malachor, but to be honest it was always there. Malachor just made everything more difficult.</p>
            </blockquote>





	here we are safe, here in this quiet

Bao-Dur's never had a problem with words. Words are simple enough, written down in Basic or Iridonian. He's never been a particularly big reader, at least not of fiction, but he reads his technical manuals just fine. Words aren't the problem. The problem is using them. Speaking is the problem.

He knows people assume this problem of his started after Malachor, but to be honest it was always there, Malachor just made everything more difficult.

Talking to droids is fine, although it does sometimes make him feel a bit pathetic. His third language is Droid, and it's a joy to hear, simple, efficient, devoid of the ambiguities of organic tongues. So mostly, if he's building a droid for himself, he won't give them a vocabulator. There's no need. He understands what they say and they understand what he says. They keep him company, and he keeps them in perfect order. He talks, and they listen. It's a pretty good arrangement. He's not one of the sad loose screws who think droids can replace people. They're just machines, but they're good machines and they need him.

Talking to the General is... okay, mostly. She doesn't stare at him while they talk, just works on her lightsaber while he replaces faulty wiring. He trusts her. Bao-Dur will always trust the General, with his life, his soul, and everything else. That was decided fifteen years ago. Etched out in dying starships and currents of light and the blood from a lost arm. They're bound together now by their shared culpability, their shared horror and guilt and rage.

They never bring it up in more than brief references. It should be awkward, this silence between them. Instead it's comforting, like a physical tie. There's no anxiety in talking to the General. They saw the worst of each other a long time ago. The only way to go is up, the only way to survive is to rebuild. She likes the droids almost as much as he does, probably for the same reasons. They talk about things that are at once very superficial and very personal. And they talk about the Force.

He's had teachers before. He's never had someone teach him like this.

“Here,” she says, something small and sparkling in her hands, and for a moment he tenses, worried she's going to toss it at him and he'll have to attempt to catch it with the robotic speed he's still not particularly good at judging, but she just leans forward, holds it out in a flat palm until he picks it up, fleshy fingers closing around a cloudy white crystal, egg-sized but almost spherical. He moves it around, one hand to the next, rolling it. It's a beautiful thing. The metal registers the pressure, the weight of the object, but only when it's in his green palm can he feel the warmth of it, the smooth surface sanded to a polish.

He looks in her direction and sees she's got a crystal of her own, a dark slate gray lump with just the slightest glint of clear depths. It glimmers in the lowered light level. When she speaks, she's as quiet and deliberate as ever, voice just about audible above the comfortable background hum of the ship. “Are you good with how you're sitting?”

Bao-Dur thinks about his crossed legs, bent knees, traces the tangent of one thigh muscle with a steel finger. “Yeah,” he says.

“Okay,” she says. “Hold the crystal in both your hands.”

Both? If she says so. He cradles the white crystal in his palms. It looks serene. He wonders if there's a world somewhere with a moon that looks like this crystal, if the inhabitants look up at it from time to time and are pacified.

“Calm your mind. Focus on the crystal. Don't think about it. Don't think about anything. Just feel the stone in your hands.”

After two weeks of meditation he's finally getting the trick of it. He slips into the quiet space inside of him, the well of peace he slips into when he's fixing a droid or repairing a bulkhead.

“The Jedi academy teaches that the Force is external,” she told him, during their first session. “You're supposed to reach out to the Force, and let it help you. They believe that only Sith find strength within.” There was something that might be bitterness in her words. “But they are wrong.” She was still quiet, but her words were firmer. “They limit themselves to only half of the universe, when they say that. The Force is outside, and the Force is inside, but the Force isn't all. You have your own strength inside of you, and the absence of the Force can be as powerful as its presence.”

Bao-Dur wondered at the time how much she thought of her own teacher when she spoke. Something was going on between the General and the old lady, and it worried him when he let it. But that was her business. All he could do was trust her, and listen to what she said.

And now the meditation is easy, and he feels it, how he is contained as himself, strong walls around his core, but there are doorways in the wall and the Force washes through them. If he moves with that tide he can flow to meet the energy in the crystal.

“I feel it,” he says. “It's... rejuvenating, I suppose. It wants to fix things.”

“Yes,” she says. “It's a healing crystal. You're good at this.”

Her tone doesn't change but he's warmed by her praise, and knows the warmth comes from the bond between them. This is something he'd never guessed at, watching the Jedi in the war, observing their wordless understanding of each other. He'd never dreamed that two people could communicate intent so easily, without faces or voice changes or body language. It feels like being known.

“Can you feel the crystal's power through your hands?”

He nods.

“Through both of your hands?”

He blinks, startled. He makes a questioning sound.

“My friend,” she says, “I was always taught that the Force only flowed through living matter. That a metal limb was a permanent deadening of the Force. But I was also told that aliens aren't attuned to the Force, and I'll tell you a secret-” friendly amusement rolled down the bond- “you're best student I've ever had.”

Bao-Dur feels an eyebrow twitch. “Better than Mical?”

“Better than Mical, better than Brianna, better than Mira, _definitely_ better than Atton.” She laughs a little out loud. “Visas is ahead of you but even she's not as quick to pick things up. Look, I know this may not work out, but could you try?”

"Is that why the old lady doesn't want a prosthetic? Does she think I'm deadened?" The thought is- odd. A Jedi defying her master to teach him. Kind of flattering.

The General sighs. "Kreia underestimates you," she says. "One of her _many_ flaws. Don't think about her. Think about the crystal."

He lets out a sigh of his own, closes his eyes, blocks out sound and smell, focuses on the feel of the crystal. His left hand has no sensors for heat or texture, but he knows what it would feel like, doesn't he? He can tell all those things from his right hand, and more than that, he can feel the crystal itself telling him. His old arm isn't coming back. But he's learned to work with the new one for most things- maybe he can do it with this, too, take information from other parts of his body and use it to fill in the gaps.

Weight. Hardness. Maybe that's all he needs. He rolls it into the metal hand, drops the other one to his side. Talk to me, he thinks at the rock, like it's a shy little sensor droid. You know I'm here. I just want to see how beautiful you are. I want to help you do what you were meant to do. I'm right here. Come and find me.

A shiver of pleased excitement from the General intrudes on his concentration. He opens his eyes. In his palm he holds a softly glowing ball of light. “Oh,” he murmurs, awed.

“It's definitely yours now,” she says.

The first gift he's gotten in fifteen years. He touches it gently with the tip of his right index finger; it's only a little warm. Too small for a lightsaber, but it can't hurt to carry around. And it's lovely.

“Thank you, General,” he says, glad he can find the words this time.

“I want you to hold it in both your hands again,” she tells him. “Sink into it.”

The crystal hums, welcoming him. It vibrates all around, encompassing, protecting. He watches the light play inside the structure. It looks alive. It makes him think of Telos.

“Okay,” his teacher says. She sounds a little distant. “Bao-Dur,” she says, and then he knows she's serious. The entire lesson was a set up, a lead in to this conversation they are about to have.

“Yes,” he says.

An uncertain pause before she speaks.

“Malachor happened. We can't forget it.”

His fingers tighten on the crystal. It hums sympathetically.

“I'm not trying to forget it.”

“You're trying to solve it,” she insists. “You can't. We can't. It's not a thing that has an answer, or a reason, or an _end_.”

He's not sure what he can say to that. Not sure what she wants from him.

“I wish I'd never told you to build the mass shadow generator. I wish I hadn't ordered you to press that button. Every day, I wish I'd chosen differently.”

“I don't,” he mutters around the knots in his chest. “I'm glad for what you did.” He feels like his hands should be shaking. It's disorienting to see them so steady in his lap.

She's quiet.

“I didn't know what the weapon would do, but I built it anyway, because _I hated them,_ and _nothing_ could be too bad for them-” The anger surges up and slams his throat closed. She is patient, still looking at her hands, folded around the crystal in her hands.

His crystal murmurs. The ship hums. He can hear distant voices coming from the galley. He listens for the sounds of his inner self winding down.

He says, “I'm not truly angry at the Mandalorians. Not any more. I am not angry at you, General.” He swallows, mouth dry. “I could never be angry at you.”

He can see some of her face in his peripheral vision. Tears roll down her nose and drip down her chin. For the first time she looks every one of her forty-three years. The woman who ended the Mandalorian War lets her tears fall without wiping them away.

“I'm angry at what happened,” he says.

_I'm angry that I lost my arm. I'm angry that the Republic fleet gave me this prosthetic and my last paycheck and left me on a Coruscant street. I'm angry that Mandalore isn't someone I can hate. I'm angry that I can't look Mira in the eye without remembering that I killed her parents. I'm angry that the greatest Jedi this forsaken galaxy could ever ask for is exiled and wounded and crying on the hard metal floor of this cargo bay. I'm angry that I can't help her._

The remote comes over to them, whistling anxiously. His Jedi reaches a hand out to touch it. “And Kreia says they're just machines.” Her fingers stroke the small round shape. “Nothing _just_ about it.”  
  
Bao-Dur takes a moment to arrange the words, to make sure they're right. “Thank you,” he says to her. “Thank you for teaching me. For opening me to the Force. And to the emptiness.”

Her arm stretches out. Her crystal falls into his hands, clinking against his. He feels the heat of her skin and then he feels the sadness. The dark crystal is whispering in his ear of regrets as big as stars and a monumental wrong that can never be righted, a sin that no penance or prayer can erase.

“I wish we'd never met,” says the woman who will always be his general. “But thank you. For being here. For being you. It helps. It's all that ever helps.”

He just wishes there was more he could do.


End file.
